How To Move Beyond Google And Apple And Expand Into Alternative App Stores

I write about digital transformation in the mobile space, and am the CTO and co-founder of Mobile DevOps company Bitrise.

For Western mobile organizations and developers, there are currently a number of barriers to launching apps into China. But unlike in Western app stores, Apple and Google aren’t what stands between mobile organizations and the users of nearly a billion devices in China alone. 

One of the biggest challenges is not knowing how to operate outside of the confines of Apple and Google in order to make the leap into what is known as alternative app stores (i.e., non-Apple and non-Google app stores). In China, the market is dominated by app stores created by device manufacturers such as Huawei, Vivo, Xiaomi and Oppo. 

Huawei’s AppGallery alone self-reports an audience of 530 million monthly users. Samsung additionally sells a quarter of a billion smartphones per year, all of which have their Galaxy Store preinstalled. 

Meanwhile, in China, Apple only accounts for an estimated 8%-13% of the market. And Google is unable to offer Google Play Services to some of the biggest Chinese manufacturers, which means that Android developers have to navigate new Android app stores to distribute their apps. 

What I’ve learned working with more than 6,000 mobile organizations is that even though alternative app stores have a massive global audience, the biggest barrier to entry is the belief that publishing in them doesn’t have enough return on investment for the effort. 

Here are three ways mobile companies can expand into alternative app stores with far less work than they might imagine.

1. Use the same process used to submit to Google or Apple to submit to other app stores. 

Many developers use some sort of mobile workflow software to automate the processes that go into mobile app development. One of these processes is submitting apps to the major app stores.

Mobile organizations can use this exact same process to submit to alternative app stores, with little to no manual work required beyond the initial setup. This option is arguably the easiest way to expedite the process of publishing to an alternative app store. 

For companies that want to submit to Huawei, this process has become even easier ever since the second-largest smartphone maker — and provider of one of the biggest alternative app markets in the world — actively launched a program designed to make it easier for developers to publish their apps into its app store. 

Huawei’s App Gallery Deploy step enables developers to deploy their Android app to Huawei's 540 million users in 30 minutes or less. This move serves the dual purpose of attracting the world’s best app developers to submit their apps to the Huawei platform and ensures that its user base has access to the world’s best apps. (Full disclosure: Huawei is a Bitrise partner.)

Mobile companies can take advantage of integrations such as this on their mobile devops platforms to seamlessly enter a new global market. 

2. Partner with a publisher that’s already submitting to app stores.

The process of publishing an app doesn’t have to rely solely on the development team. To take some work off of developers’ plates, companies can partner with a publisher.

Especially when it comes to getting into Chinese app stores, developers will work with publishers who submit to individual app stores so that they don’t have to. This strategy is very popular in the case of gaming apps. In addition to having the effort of publishing taken off their hands, other benefits include marketing and localization for the app. The only downside of this method is that app publishing partners will take a revenue cut on top of the share for the app store operator. 

3. One App Submission, Multiple Stores

The Google Play app submission is a process that takes developers through a series of steps for the prospect of uploading their app to a singular app store: Google’s. 

Luckily, not all platforms only allow submissions to go to one place. Publishing portals multiply the effectiveness of a single manual submission with just a slight variation on the Google Play process. These portals enable developers to deploy to multiple app stores with a single submission. In most cases, not only do developers achieve a wider reach, but they are also provided with statistics on the app’s performance across each app store. Knowing where an app is performing best can help with deployment decisions in the long run.

A couple of popular publishing portals developers can use are Condengo and Unity Distribution Platform (UDP).

Publishing to alternative app stores presents developers the opportunity to generate hundreds of thousands of installs from brand new audiences. This expansion opens a realm of possibilities, with a limited amount of manual labor. Alternative app stores are going to continue to gain popularity, and the companies that use them will be on track to see exponential growth.

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